The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Manager can detect all system faults. Normally, system faults are categorized as critical, major, minor, and warnings. Cisco recommends that you monitor all critical and major severity faults. As in Cisco NX-OS, the Cisco UCS supports different monitoring protocols, such as standard syslog, SNMP, NetFlow, Call Home, and SPAN traffic monitoring. In addition, the Cisco UCS provides monitoring for the computing environment, such as XML application programming interface (API), audit logs, statistics collection, database health monitoring, and computing hardware monitoring.
The Cisco UCS Manager core is made up of three elements: the data management engine, application gateway, and user-accessible northbound interface. The northbound interface is composed of SNMP, syslog, XML API, and UCSM CLI.
You can monitor the Cisco UCS Manager servers through XML API, SNMP, and syslog. Both SNMP and syslog are interfaces used only for monitoring because they are read-only, so no configuration changes are allowed from these interfaces. Alternatively, the XML API is a monitoring interface that is read-write, which allows you to monitor the Cisco UCS Manager and change the configuration if needed. Figure 13-1 shows the core and monitoring interfaces.
Figure 13-1 Cisco UCS Manager Core and Monitoring Interfaces
Data Management Engine
The data management engine (DME) is the center of the Cisco UCS Manager system, which maintains the following components:
The Cisco UCS XML database, which houses the inventory database of all physical elements (blade and rack mount servers, chassis, modules, and fabric interconnects)
The logical configuration data for profiles, policies, pools, vNIC, and vHBA templates
The various networking-related configuration details like VLANs, VSANs, port channels, network uplinks, and server downlinks
The DME monitors
The current health and state of all components of all physical and logical elements in a Cisco UCS domain
The transition information of all finite state machine (FSM) tasks occurring
The Cisco UCS XML database stores only the current inventory, health, and managed endpoints config information, resulting in a near real-time XML data file. By default, the DME does not store a historical log of faults that have occurred on a Cisco UCS domain. As fault conditions are raised on the endpoints, the DME creates faults in the Cisco UCS XML database. As those faults are mitigated, the DME clears and removes the faults from the Cisco UCS XML database.
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